Commentary on Radio & Audio

December 2010

December 22, 2010

1. Change Our Language. Today the buzz for measurement is "monthly uniques." If it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for radio. Drop the term "cume." Start using monthly uniques in every pitch and presentation.

2. Kill Average Quarter Hours. Why do we insist on complicating things? Don't sell by AQH. As Bob Pittman said, it may be a tool for exact placement, but it's not a tool for selling. In Internet terms, this is "simultaneous usage." But the number isn't great, so Internet companies don't talk about it. Why should you?

3. Promote Our Growth. With all the negative press about "old media," I think we've started buying it. The fact is, PPM shows that more people listen to radio than we ever knew. Our reach in 1970 was 92.7 percent, and in 2010, it's 93 percent. We're going up. When was the last time you updated your clients?

4. Change Perceptions. The perception of radio, perpetuated in the media, is much worse than the reality. Each of us needs to do our part to show the real truth. Get the facts, and set the record straight. Fight to tell radio's powerful story.

5. Look At Digital As An Opportunity. Not a threat. Yes, digital is hot, but so is radio. Our numbers hold up against theirs. Digital + radio is better than digital alone.

6. Cannibalize Dying Media. Newspapers and Yellow Pages ARE dying. Newspapers still have 16 percent of all ad dollars, and Yellow Pages have 7 percent. That's a total of $31.3 billion that has to go somewhere. Why not to radio?

7. Keep Your Rates Up. Do you want to be known as the local prostitute? Low prices and cutting rates send bad signals. Fight a little harder for every dollar. Don't give in so easily.

8. Spend More Time With Clients. Seems simple, but management people and owners sometimes get stuck behind the desk. More time with clients will not only help you sell more, it will help you understand more. That will impact your business.

9. Focus On Campaigns, Not Spots. Campaigns work. Spots don't. Clients (and your sellers) need to understand the difference and be shown why they will see better results with more time on the air, over longer periods of time.

10. Focus On Moving Product. Rather than focusing on hitting budgets and numbers, make sure you're there to SERVE your advertisers. Change the focus of every discussion so it's about moving product and solving their problems. If you move product, people don't care about audience sizes or listening levels.

11. Overdeliver. Got extra inventory? Fill it with more spots from your paying clients. You don't even need to tell them. The goal is to pack their stores and move more product with every tool at your disposal… your airtime, your website, your newsletters. Blow them away with what your station is willing to do to bring them business, and you'll have friends for life.

12. Only Run Ads That Will Work. Crummy ads written by our own stations, our advertisers, and local agencies simply don't work. Develop a test internally to determine whether an ad is likely to work, and if you believe it won't, fight to change it. The more time spent on ad effectiveness, the fewer clients lost because "Radio doesn't work." Remember, they are renting our airtime to reach our audiences, but if their ad is bad, we will get blamed. Help advertisers see the light by pointing out ads that won't work and suggesting alternatives. If they insist, you'll be on record as saying the ad won't work. But you'll probably change their mind, and change their results.

December 10, 2010

"He must have been an important man," said a friend when I was telling him about Stu Olds' funeral, held yesterday. I replied, "Yes, he was an important man. But even important men don't draw that many people to their funeral unless people also love them. People came to honor Stu because he had made them feel important."

On the flight back home last night, I was reflecting on the funeral, which was standing-room-only in a church that seats about 2,500 people. Every seat was taken, the balcony was packed, and there were people lined up 20 rows deep outside the sanctuary. Following the funeral, a ballroom at the Italian Club in Stamford filled more tables than most industry conventions for a lunch gathering in honor of Stu.

Women and men came from all across the country to say goodbye to Stu. It was like a family reunion of broadcasters from the last few decades in radio. I spotted and talked with dozens of former broadcasters whom we've not seen at industry events since the mid-'90s.

People flew in from all corners of America to honor this man not because of the position he held, but because he always focused on uplifting others. The common theme, expressed time and again, was Stu's compassion and how he spent his life encouraging others. His greatness came from his ability to make everyone feel important by taking the time to listen and to care.

Stu not only and encouraged his team members and advertisers (all of whom he referred to as his partners), he gave them countless examples of how he believed in them. He lived by helping people see things in themselves they didn't know were there.

The legacy Stu Olds left the radio industry is as an example of true leadership. When Dave Ramsey spoke at our Forecast meeting Tuesday, he talked about how great leaders focus on service to their employees, always keeping in mind the deep responsibility to the families of those employees as well. He discussed how great leaders serve at all levels.

The best way we can honor Stu is to try to emulate his interest in serving others, and by emulating his deep care for and belief in his people and his calm and cheerful outlook. Katz's success was based on Stu's ability to empower others through, as John Hogan called it, a "fierce loyalty" to his people.

When your interest is in serving others, you change the nature of business. That brings stronger, deeper, more meaningful success. People will go through brick walls for you when they serve a greater purpose. Reflecting Stu's example is a greater purpose.

The loss of Stu Olds leaves a giant void in each of our lives and in our industry, as a friend and colleague, because of the leadership he showed by his contribution to industry initiatives and boards, and because his leadership built the largest and greatest radio rep firm of all time. He led a team dedicated to growing national revenue for radio, the majority of which has come from Katz over the last few years.

Stu may have been radio's greatest salesman. People told stories of how he went into every deal believing he would win, and knowing he would make every sale. He approached business with big ideas, and fought for and finessed every deal he could get.

We will never get over the loss of Stu Olds, but each of us, his friends, his colleagues, and his employees, must move on. In true Stu spirit, he would probably have said, with a twinkle in his eye, "OK, you attended a funeral this morning. But did you make a sale this afternoon?"

Radio Ink honored Stu by dedicating our Forecast Conference to him on Tuesday, and Stu received a grand sendoff yesterday. But probably the best way we can honor Stu Olds is to make a sale in his honor. He would probably like that more than anything.

So, all next week, why not set some lofty goals, make some big-dollar presentations, and close the business in honor of Stu? It doesn't have to be a sale for Katz or Clear Channel, or even the companies he represented. A great sale for the good of radio would be a great honor for him. Will you do that for Stu Olds next week?

Also, I'd like to announce that, as part of our annual Radio Ink Radio Wayne Awards, we will create a new award, the Stu Olds Award, to keep his memory alive for future generations of broadcasters.

Eric RhoadsRadio InkAddendum: We still have some of our new Mighty Red HD 2 radio's left, which make great advertiser and employee gifts. TO GET CHRISTMAS DELIVERY, THEY MUST BE ORDERED BEFORE DECEMBER 15th. Every station with HD will soon be enabled to run graphics in sync with audio so you can place your logo along with photos of your events, personalities, advertisers and artists played on the touch screen of this radio. To learn more, go to www.mightyredhd.com.

December 06, 2010

Urgent: The FCC's Genachowski Is Playing With Fire And America/Radio is About to Get Burned

As in a magic show, things are not always what they appear to be. In Washington, gentle names are given to horrible ideas so they appear fine to the general public. The FCC and Chairman Julius Genachowski are about to pull the wool over the eyes of America, then clobber us over the head.

The FCC is due to vote December 21 on a set of new "net neutrality" regulations. (Sounds harmless, right?) The open meeting at which the vote will be held was moved from December 15, leading some to speculate that the commission wanted to bury this key vote in holiday distractions. But that isn't really Chairman Genachowski's style.

Indeed, Genachowski has been quite straightforward about his desire to get regulatory control of the Internet. So was his predecessor, Kevin Martin, whose attempt to sanction Comcast for throttling down BitTorrent traffic ultimately led to the Comcast v. FCC decision, in which the DC appeals court ruled that the commission had overreached its authority in attempting to tell Comcast how to run its network.

But sharks want to swim and regulators want to regulate, and the commission couldn't shrug off that Comcast decision. So one of Genachowski's leading priorities as chairman -- indeed, practically his only public priority -- has been to get FCC control over the Internet. To that end, he has adopted the language of "Net neutrality" and the "open Internet."

Beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing.

What, exactly, does Genachowski want to do in the name of openness and neutrality? It's all fairly murky right now. The commission hasn't released the exact draft rules on which it intends to vote. Keeps us guessing and reduces flak.

But the rules will, Genachowski said, involve a "transparency" requirement (a fairly hilarious demand from an agency that won't make public the industry-changing rules on which it plans to vote in less than three weeks). There will also be a ban on "unreasonable discrimination in transmitting lawful network traffic." But the rules will allow for "reasonable network management."

All very (ahem) reasonable, right? But, setting aside the question of what the FCC will consider to be reasonable, and the likelihood that any definition will be flexible enough to adjust as technology develops rather than simply stopping that development in its tracks, the fact is, how private businesses manage the infrastructure in which they have invested their own resources is none of the FCC's concern.

And, more to the point, "net neutrality" is a solution to an imaginary problem.

Though there have been periodic disputes, no one is contending that telecom or cable companies are interfering with broadband traffic in any systematic way. What worries the "net neutrality" brigade is the notion that these sinister "gatekeepers" could do it if they wanted to; comments from Free Press and other activist groups are full of references to what these companies could do, or really want to do. (Comcast's ill-considered decision to mislead customers about its blocking BitTorrent was not helpful in this part of the debate. But that was in 2007, eons ago in Internet time.)

Right now, the explosive growth of the bandwidth-intensive Netflix -- and no doubt Netflix rivals to come -- could cause some issues in fairly short order. In fact, Level 3 is duking it out in public right now over Comcast's desire to charge Level 3 more for access to its network now that Level 3 has a contract to supply streaming to Netflix. (Level 3 says Comcast is violating net neutrality principles with the proposed added fees; Comcast says Level 3 wants to reframe long-standing traffic-exchange principles among networks as a net neutrality issue. )

But consumers who find their movie service being degraded or who are being charged extra for "excess" bandwidth will soon find new providers. It will likely get rocky for a while, and then technology and the market will sort it out. This is how it's worked for some 25 years, during which the Internet has merrily thrived with hardly any government regulation at all.

It is also worth noting that Genachowski specified that he is no longer looking to reclassify broadband as a Title II telecommunications service, which would mean treating it as though it were a monopoly phone company. He couldn't get that notion past even the current Congress, which has not been, one might say, averse to government overreach.

The FCC is naturally splitting along party lines on this, with the two Republicans, Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker, releasing blunt statements in opposition and Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps in support.

This will be approved later this month, though Copps, who is ordinarily Genachowski's reliable wingman, is still apparently holding out hope for Title II regulation. Indeed, the fact that Copps is in favor of "Net neutrality" is in itself a pretty good indication that this is not about freedom and openness. Take a look at Copps' latest ideas for broadcasters.

Michael Copps sees it as part of the FCC's mandate to investigate and judge the "state of journalism," and to create tests of a station's "public value," and even to count how many local or regional artists get on the air. What sort of regulation do you suppose Copps will feel is appropriate for an FCC-controlled Internet?

What's this got to do with radio? Radio, like every other media business, is going to rely more and more on the Internet for revenue and content delivery. Digital is already a key and growing part of radio's business model. The FCC would like to insert itself into that part of your business, introducing regulatory uncertainty, unsettling potential investors, and interfering with the natural development of the market and of technology. Does that sound appealing?

To allow the FCC to get its hands on the Internet on the basis that bad things might happen -- things that have natural, market-driven solutions -- would be wildly short-sighted and destructive. Indeed, the very notion that government regulation of any communications medium will lead to greater freedom and openness would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous.

There's probably nothing that can stop the FCC from approving this in a party-line vote on December 21. But some legislators have already vowed that they'll do everything they can to undo it. I urge you to get in touch with your representatives and help make sure that stopping Genachowski and the FCC from taking control of the Internet is a top priority in the new Congress.